With
Bertie Ahern having been at so many turning points
in the peace process at which he failed to turn
before, no one courted ridicule by predicting he
would continue eyes-front in the wake of the Northern
Bank robbery. When eventually he performed his volte-face
many heads snapped at the perfect ten execution
of the act.
Sinn
Fein was left to defensively tackle with the weaker
foot. Its Iveagh House team-mates failed to muster
sufficient centre-field cover. The party leadership,
rendered narcoleptic by its accumulated experience
of the two governments’ non-response to the
many previous actions of the party militia, instinctively
behaved as if the most it faced was a political
squall followed by yet another round of ‘and
whatever you’re having yourself.’ A mere
six months after having faced the furious barrage
of accusations that accompanied the Bobby Tohill
‘kidnapping’, the party was at Leeds Castle
processing alongside the DUP like never before.
Such was the arrogant complacency of some of its
leaders that they brazenly and openly revelled in
their lying, labouring under the misapprehension
that the lie would always command a privileged space
within the sacred tabernacle of the peace process.
Now
that Ahern has spit on the tabernacle and placed
Sinn Fein’s senior commanders in the frame
for the bank heist, a credibility crisis has beset
the party. Its Capo di tuti capo, Gerry Adams, has
seen a steady metamorphosis in his public image
from international statesman to universal liar.
Ahern’s
masterstroke lay not in accusing the IRA but in
unambiguously placing Sinn Fein leaders at the heart
of the decision-making processes within the IRA.
In doing so he has signalled that the party’s
leaders will publicly carry the can for any actions
engaged in by their own militia. The legal fictions
have been dissolved. No longer will institutional
power inflict the myth on society that the Sinn
Fein leadership goes to the IRA, that the two are
somehow separate entities.
Potentially
this imposes a degree of constraint on the party
leadership’s room for manoeuvre. To the extent
that it organises, sanctions, or ordains violence,
there will no longer be an official cloak behind
which it can absolve itself of responsibility. Strategically
using the process to undermine the peace as an aid
to its own expansionism now comes with a health
warning. Sinn Fein exposure to the Republic’s
electorate and Corporate Irish America will lack
the glamour of yesteryear. Nobody is photogenic
in a balaclava. If the party leadership insists
on continuing to run a functioning IRA, or worse,
one which reverts to ‘war’, it will incur
all the wrath reserved for those depicted as ‘directing
terrorism’ in the post-9/11 world.
Sinn
Fein demands that the ‘side issue’ robbery
be forgotten about and that society should just
carry on with the ‘real task’ of endless
processing has fallen on deaf ears. If anything,
with Dublin taking the lead, the Irish and British
governments have firmed up their ‘get lost’
stance. Wednesday’s petulant response by the
IRA in which it referred to its unwillingness to
remain quiescent is the language of splendid isolation;
as self-defeating as it is self-pitying. Having
spent twelve years edging its way out of the corner,
life in the shadows has little or no appeal for
new Sinn Fein. The language of the victim might
provide a comfort blanket but fails to grip the
political nettle that the governments have reluctantly
been forced to grasp.
London
and Dublin now accept that a power sharing executive
in the North and the continued existence of the
IRA are mutually irreconcilable. Consequently, they
have gambled on manipulating the power lust of the
Sinn Fein president, forcing him to choose between
being marginalised to the ghetto as chief corner
boy of West Belfast, and taking his place on the
international stage alongside the Nouveau Rich.
In
spite of this Sinn Fein, while peeved that the veils
of the peace process have been stripped away, calculates
that it can withstand the hurricane. It has journeyed
here before and knows the terrain well. Experience
has equipped it with the necessary hide to sit out
the storm. The current proclivity of London and
Dublin to hold on to the peace process, despite
the vituperative tone of their discourse, will assure
Sinn Fein that the current mutual standoff does
not preclude some mutual embrace.
The
governments are right to refrain from recommending
sanctions against the party. Arbitrarily punishing
the electorate for the democratic choices that it
makes subverts the very democracy that those advocating
sanctions ostensibly promote. But the insistence
by Dublin in particular that the US administration
should not bin Sinn Fein’s invitation to the
St Patrick’s Day festivities at the White House
will be interpreted as an indication that processing
will at some point be back on track. Sinn Fein leaders
could hardly scream ‘discrimination’ were
they to be treated like all other convicted felons
who seek access to the US.
For
this reason spare a thought for Micky McKevitt.
From his shamrock-free Portlaoise cell, where he
may contemplate the presence of his former fellow
commanders on the White House lawn, he has good
grounds for concluding that his real misfortune
was to have directed activity for the Wrong IRA.
